This is another article that sat in the drafts folder for far too long- Last edited Feb 21st, 2006. I fear writing about tar, and that is why I’m determined to finish it in this sitting, so it won’t fester and scare me off of this series. Why am I scared of writing about tar? Well, this is their flags list verbatim from the man page: [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --blocking-factor N ] [ -B, --read-full-records ] [ --backup BACKUP-TYPE ] [ --block-com- press ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [ --check-links ] [ --checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [ --force-local ] [ --format FORMAT ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -G, --incremental ] [ --group GROUP ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ --help ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-case ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ --index-file FILE ] [ -j, --bzip2 ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ --keep-newer-files ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --touch, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ --mode PER- MISSIONS ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ --newer-mtime DATE ] [ --no-anchored ] [ --no-ignore-case ] [ --no-recursion ] [ --no-same-permissions ] [ --no-wildcards ] [ --no-wildcards-match-slash ] [ --null ] [ --numeric-owner ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability, --no-same-owner ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ --occurrence NUM ] [ --overwrite ] [ --overwrite-dir ] [ --owner USER ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --abso- lute-names ] [ --pax-option KEYWORD-LIST ] [ --posix ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --block-number ] [ --record-size SIZE ] [ --recursion ] [ --recursive-unlink ] [ --remove-files ] [ --rmt-command CMD ] [ --rsh-command CMD ] [ -s, --same- order, --preserve-order ] [ -S, --sparse ] [ --same-owner ] [ --show-defaults ] [ --show-omitted-dirs ] [ --strip-com- ponents NUMBER, --strip-path NUMBER (1) ] [ --suffix SUFFIX ] [ -T, --files-from F ] [ --totals ] [ -U, --unlink- first ] [ --use-compress-program PROG ] [ --utc ] [ -v, --verbose ] [ -V, --label NAME ] [ --version ] [ --volno-file F ] [ -w, --interactive, --confirmation ] [ -W, --verify ] [ --wildcards ] [ --wildcards-match-slash ] [ --exclude PATTERN ] [ -X, --exclude-from FILE ] [ -Z, --compress, --uncompress ] [ -z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip ] [ -[0-7][lmh] ] So it’s a bit overwhelming.

This article was originally written back on Feb 21st, 2006. While never completed, I thought it was worth sharing. Cat is a very simple utility- so simple I debated added it to this list. There are however three really useful flags. I’ll try to write as much as I can about it so you don’t feel ripped off by this article. hrm… did that last sentence sound like filler? I swear it wasn’t meant to- that’s completely on accident.

So this year I managed to snag the Humble Bundle package;Â If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a pack of Indie Games bundled together. There are five good reasons why you should consider getting it: Name your own price ($5000 or $0.01 – your call) You choose who the money goes to (charities and/or developers) If you pay more than the average donation, you get Humble Bundle #1 from last year.

So Ian is staying with Jackie’s mom this weekend. Jackie left to drop him off about 10am friday morning with the intent of being back in Troy to pick me up around 6pm. Around 3pm one of the guys I work with walked into the room and began a conversation like this: [matt] Anyone want tickets to see Kids in the Hall? [me] How much? [matt] Free. [me] ooh, I’ll take them!

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

Summary: Horrible- do not buy. Jackie was planning on being out of town this weekend, so I asked her to rent a random Wii game for me while she was gone. She came back with Legend of the Dragon- looking at the cover it appeared to be some sort of RPG, and she knew I liked those so she picked it up. Once I fired it up, I found the fatal flaw of this plan.

Slashdot is full of random crap, cliches and trolls- but buried deep within this pile of refuse is some useful and interesting info waiting to get out. The following is my checklist to find the relevant posts: 1) only read stories that actually look interesting. It seems like a simple thing, but it’s completely overlooked. As heart-warming as it is to read about them recovering Scotty’s ashes, it’ll be a waste of half an hour reading the same old rehashed star trek jokes.

I was really looking forward to this game- I vaguely remembered playing Metal Slug at a Pizza Hut many years ago, and was looking forward to seeing all the games wrapped up into one package (it even had a new sequel, Metal Slug 6, included). The game is a side scroller shoot-em-up where you get different guns and shoot the bad guys before they shoot you. When I got it home and started playing it, I found a slight problem- it’s a perfect replica of the arcade game- you die quick and have to put in another quarter- only instead of quarters, you press start.

ok, I’m gonna start doing reviews for the games I rent for the Wii- the ratings will go something like this: First Tier Buy: Great game, you should absolutely buy it Second Tier Buy: Decent- not the best, but still fun. Third Tier Buy: If you’ve run out of things to try, give it a shot. Don’t Bother: I won’t even recommend renting it.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

I have two requirements for a program being on this list: the first one is it has to be a utility- something scriptable or usable on the command line. The second is it also needs to have multiple arcane flags that I can write about, or just be so unknown that it’ll bring it to the attention of people that have never heard of it. Tee falls into the “never heard of it” group.

So I just got back from my first concert without jackie in a long long time- went with my friend phil to the orbit room to see Coheed and Cambria. The events are as followed: * went and got dinner * went to the orbit room, realized phil was the “old guy” there (actually 3 or 4 people ended up beating him for that title) We got a table in the back because, since we were 10-15 years older than 9/10ths of the crowd and needed the support.

Bruce campbell is sort of a hero of mine- he seems like a nice guy, he’s very charismatic, and plays a lot of roles that I find memorable (which include Evil Dead 1 and 2, army of darkness, Brisco County Jr, and a hundred other bitparts). I got his book for christmas a while back and never got around to reading it- actually, I only read it after a friend borrowed it and said the beginning was ok, but it got boring in the middle.

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

So, I’m compiling a list of what’s missing from my BSD install from the get go. tab-complete – stupid default shell is csh, which means no tab complete. Come on guys, jump on up to 1999. alt key – This is probably a keymap issue, but the alt and delete keys do not work. Alt acts like it does nothing, and delete behaves like a tilde. This means no alt tab.

Holy crap, welcome to 1980. The FreeBSD install is going to take a little bit longer than I thought. I booted off the Install CD and the first thing I noticed was the lack of color. Not shiny pretty GUI color, but angry fruit salad color. As pages of white text on black blackground whizzed past my screen, nothing stuck out as important; I noticed no dividers between sections. This is a very small, trivial thing, but it is nice.

Whereis is an older utility- it’s functionality shows us of a time when a program not only had a man page, but also stored the source on the machine in question. That’s becoming more rare as programs like firefox come into play- firefox, for example, has no man page and doesn’t install the source (due to size issues). Whereis locates the binary, man page and source of a given command on the current machine.

So yesterday a coworker came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to FOSE- I have a vague idea it was a government tech convention, but that’s about it. Since I have a Gov’t ID badge, I was able to get in for free. So Cris(the boss), David and Terrance went into DC in search of the washington DC convention center. It should be noted that this is not the MCI Center, Metro Center, or the Verizon Center- it’s a completely generic convention center with a completely generic name.

Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often. chown can change the owner and group of a file or files. Standard usage goes something like this

With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line. ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will list the contents of all regular files and directories in the current directory. you can provide with with a target such as ls /foo or with multiple targets like ls /mnt /opt or ls foo.

So Today is the last day that I get to play with Jackie’s M5. I’m gonna miss it 🙁 on the bright sid,e I did find out something cool- the battery almost died on the way to work- that’s because it hasn’t been charged since monday. The long ass battery life this thing has is very nice. I thought when I connected it to a USB cable it would trickle charge, but it turns out, as I just found out a few moments ago, you have to slide the power charge on, then the “charge button” I mentioned on day one glows bright red- it’s a light, not a button!

Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but needed to shut down your laptop and bring it home. You could ssh into the machine and simply start the compiling, but the compilation would stop when you broke the ssh connection by shutting off the laptop.

I ride a shuttle bus to work every day- the type with a driver and passenger seats, then 2 rows of 2 seats stretching the length of the bus, with a door on on side of the first row of seats. Every day, I watch people scramble to be the first ones off the bus- they’re smart enough to stay seated until it’s their row’s turn, but then they start jockying to get out before the people across from them.

So I’ve been using the M5 for the last few days and have been pretty impressed. I missed a few days due to a long holiday weekend, but the last few days I’ve been on it. I still haven’t read the manual- I need to check the CD tonight. It’s still broken on their site… Actually, I could just check google’s cache of the iAudio M5 mamual. I think I’ll do that now.

Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner. There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you can get all sorts of wild behavior by mixing and matching those flags. The most straightforward use is this:

Since my music collection is 100% legitimate and ripped in Ogg Vorbis, finding a portable audio place that can play my music is a bit tough. There are 3 major players and a bunch of minor ones- the Neuros, the Rio Karma and the iAudio series are the leaders however. The Rio Karma is very difficult to find these days since it went out of production. I purchased a Neuros about a year ago and it was such utter crap I returned it (which broke my heart since I was looking forward to it).

This is the first of a series of entries I’d like to do. Each week I’m gonna discuss a simple linux utility that you may or may not be familiar with. First up is cut. Cut can be used to shape data that is piped to it. for example, lets suppose you wanted a list of the real names and user names from the /etc/passwd file where you actually have a real name.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

So jackie and I did our christmas stuff early (sorta- we’re still trying to pick out a monitor for her) and I got a Pod XT Live. My friend Ryan told me about his brother’s Pod way back when I started playing guitar, and it seemed pretty cool. I’ve wanted one ever since. What’s it do? it models certain amplifiers, stompboxes and setups, effectively emulating thousands of dollars of equipment I could never afford.

real quick mention of http://del.icio.us/ – it’s a social bookmarking system- see a page you like? don’t like managing your bookmarks? check delicious out. you can see your friends bookmarks as well- so if someone has a page that you find useful bookmarked, you can check to see if they have any related bookmarks. I like it for the fact that I move from computer to computer a lot and my bookmarks needs to be portable.

So Jackie and I went and saw Serenity yesterday. It was… a very good movie. A lot of fellow geeks either love or absolutely hate the TV show Firefly and are transferring these feelings towards Serenity. I have one thing to say to all of you hatemongers. Please. Give it a chance. Watch it with an open mind before you start bashing it. I know most of you haven’t seen it.

The series started with Rendezvous with Rama, going on to Rama II, The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed. Since I’m feeling lazy, I’m not gonna write a pretentious review about how the style of the first book was different/better/worse than the following books. The series as a whole was pretty decent, lot of things made you think about how humanity as a whole will probably be cleansed when they meet another intelligent species because they’re too stupid to just be civil.

So I caught an episode of “My Name is Earl” the other day, starring Jason Lee, of Mallrats and Dogma fame. He plays a grungy scum of the earth type that has an epiphany that every time he does something bad to someone, something bad happens to him. He decides to make a list of the things he’s done bad, and right the wrongs. I saw the second episode of the series, where his friends convinced him to apologize to a friend of his who went to prison for a crime earl comitted.